Things to Do in L.A. Tap to enable a layout that focuses on the article. U.S. veteran says he faces retribution from Trump officials for protesting his wrongful arrest George Retes Jr. is seen in 2020 in Baghdad. The U.S. veteran wrote about what he says was his unlawful arrest during the Glass House ICE raid in July. He says the Department of Homeland Security is now spreading falsehoods against him for speaking out. This is read by an automated voice.

WIRED published a shocking investigation this week based on records, including audio recordings, of hundreds of emergency calls from United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention centers. The calls--which include reports of incidents of staff sexual assaults, suicide attempts, and head injuries--indicate a system inundated by life-threatening incidents, delayed treatment, and overcrowding. In a 6-3 decision on Friday, the US Supreme Court upheld a Texas porn ID law, finding that age verification for explicit sites is constitutional. In a dissent, Justice Elena Kagan warned that this determination ignores First Amendment precedent and will have privacy implications for adults. Looking at the US bombing of Iranian nuclear sites last weekend, President Donald Trump posted initial announcements of the strikes on the social Network Truth Social, which then began suffering intermittent outages.

The city of Detroit has agreed to pay 300,000 to a Black man who was wrongly arrested for shoplifting and to also change how police use facial recognition technology to solve crimes after the software identified him as a suspect. The conditions are part of a lawsuit settlement with Robert Williams. His driver's license photo was incorrectly flagged by facial recognition software as a likely match to a man seen on security video at a Shinola watch store in 2018. "We are extremely excited that going forward there will be more safeguards on the use of this technology with our hope being to live in a better world because of it," Williams told reporters, "even though what we would like for them to do is not use it at all." The agreement was announced Friday by the American Civil Liberties Union and the civil rights litigation initiative at University of Michigan Law School.

Fox News correspondent Gillian Turner has the latest on the president's focus amid calls for an impeachment inquiry on "Special Report." Six police officers swarmed Porcha Woodruff's Detroit home before 8 a.m. one morning in February while she was getting her 12- and 6-year-old kids ready for school, the federal lawsuit says. "I have a warrant for your arrest, step outside," one of the officers told Woodruff, who initially thought it was a joke, according to the lawsuit. Officers told her she was being arrested for robbery and carjacking. Do you see that I am eight months pregnant?"

How they did it: The team asked language models where they stand on various topics, such as feminism and democracy. They used the answers to plot them on a political compass, then tested whether retraining models on even more politically biased training data changed their behavior and ability to detect hate speech and misinformation (it did). Why it matters: As AI language models are rolled out into products and services used by millions, understanding their underlying political assumptions could not be more important. That's because they have the potential to cause real harm. A chatbot offering health-care advice might refuse to offer advice on abortion or contraception, for example.

Clearview AI, the controversial facial recognition software used by at least 3,100 law enforcement agencies across the US, has scrapped more than 30 billion images from social media platforms like Facebook. CEO Hoan Ton-That shared the statistic in a recent interview with BBC News (via Gizmodo) where he also said the company had run nearly 1 million searches for US police. Last March, Clearview disclosed its database featured more than 20 billion "publicly available" images, meaning the platform has grown by a staggering 50 percent over the past year. While Engadget cannot confirm those figures, they suggest the company, despite recent setbacks at the hands of groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and legal threats from platform holders, has found no shortage of interest for its services. In a rare admission, the Miami Police Department revealed it uses Clearview AI to investigate all manner of crimes, including everything from theft to murder.

Robert Williams was doing yard work with his family one afternoon last August when his daughter Julia said they needed a family meeting immediately. Once everyone was inside the house, the 7-year-old girl closed all the blinds and curtains and then told her sister and parents that she'd figured it out: Wooly Willy, a character from her toy, had stolen the watches that got her dad arrested. "She was like'We need to get to the bottom of this,'" her mother Melissa says. More recently, Melissa says, Julia has said she believes people who wear shirts that say "Detroit" represent the people who arrested her father. Williams was arrested in January 2020 for allegedly stealing five watches from a Shinola store in Detroit, after he was wrongfully identified by facial recognition software.

The phrase "artificial intelligence" can conjure up images of machines that are able to think, and act, just like humans, independent of any oversight from actual, flesh and blood people. Movies versions of AI tend to feature super-intelligent machines attempting to overthrow humanity and conquer the world. The reality is more prosaic, and tends to describe software that can solve problems, find patterns and, to a certain extent, "learn". This is particularly useful when huge amounts of data need to be sorted and understood, and AI is already being used in a host of scenarios, particularly in the private sector. Examples include chatbots able to conduct online correspondence; online shopping sites which learn how to predict what you might want to buy; and AI journalists writing sports and business articles (this story was, I can assure you, written by a human).

Four Democratic lawmakers want to ban the federal government from using facial recognition technology. Led by Massachusetts Senator Edward J. Markey and Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley, the group plans to introduce The Facial Recognition and Biometric Technology Moratorium Act to Congress. If passed, the bill would prohibit federal authorities from using the technology alongside several other biometric tools like voice recognition. Perhaps even more significantly, state and local entities, including law enforcement agencies, would need to pass their own moratoriums to secure funding from the federal government. In laying out the need for policy intervention, the group cites a report from The National Institute of Standards and Technology.

Williams's wrongful arrest, which was first reported by the New York Times in August 2020, was based on a bad match from the Detroit Police Department's facial recognition system. Two more instances of false arrests have since been made public. Both are also Black men, and both have taken legal action to try rectifying the situation. Now Williams is following in their path and going further--not only by suing the Detroit Police for his wrongful arrest, but by trying to get the technology banned. On Tuesday, the ACLU and the University of Michigan Law School's Civil Rights Litigation Initiative filed a lawsuit on behalf of Williams, alleging that his arrest violated Williams's Fourth Amendment rights and was in defiance of Michigan's civil rights law.